June 7, 2012 -- result of windowsill walk

I can hardly believe I've been to Philadelphia and back since my my last post, but I have. When I got home, I just wanted to walk around outside without purpose, but I "needed" to do a windowsill arrangement, so I collected material as I walked. Here's the result (in vases from left to right): Vase1): yellow coreopsis flower, white Houttouynia cordata flower and foliage, magenta Sweet William, chilves flower, and a blooming stem of Japanese lantern plant. Vase 2: bellflower stem (in bud), flowering Italian basil, a yellow Knockout rose, and Houttouynia cordata flower and foliage. Vase 3: perennial sweet pea, blue ageratum, yellow Knockout rose, and Houttouynia cordata flower and foliage. 4) coral rose blossom (can't remember its name) and Houttouynia cordata flower and foliage. Vase 5: peachy daylily flower with coral  honeysuckle and Houttouynia cordata flower. I'm hoping that having typed Houttouynia cordata so many times will help me remember it!  It's the plant I've been calling "hootenanny plant."

For the record, the trumpet-vine trumpets I played with yesterday were pretty much dead when I got home this afternoon.

June 6, 2012 -- playing with trumpets

Yesterday, when I picked my trumpet vine flowers, there were lots of individual trumpets, which had been shed by the vine, on the ground. Couldn't resist playing with them. My first inclination was to use one as a vase, but what I needed was a tiny pin holder to position it upright, and I didn't have one. Instead, I used a bigger pin holder, hid it in this green bowl, and positioned several trumpets upright. Then I stuck other plant material (astilbe flowers and Japanese Hanoki grass) into each trumpet. Silly, but sort of interesting.

Here's another single trumpet used more conventionally. I added it to a little vase of coleous snippings and a few leaves of Japanese Hanoki grass. Adding the trumpet was more complicated than it looks, because it had no stem. I stuck a threadlike stick down it's throat to create a stem. It's holding up surprisingly well.

June 5, 2012 -- trumpet vine

This is just regular wild trumpet vine, not a cultivated variety, but some of its blooms seem unsually red (as opposed to orange) this year. Don't know what that's about. I love the foliage as well as the flowers, and, although it's weedy, I sometimes let the runners send up shoots just so I can clip them to use as arranging greens. Their graceful tips hold up really well.

June 4, 2012 -- feverfew, coleus, and record-breaking tomatoes

Here are some coleus tips (harvested from plants mentioned yesterday) combined with the feverfew that was already in the windowsill on May 29.

And here are some (small) ripe tomatoes added to the array. John and I are usually proud if we have a ripe tomato by July 4. This year, we had three on June 3. Here are two of them. The third I ate and it tasted like....red water. Absolutely no flavor. It's a very early variety called 'Glacier.' Good description.  It tastes the way ice water would taste if it were red.

June 3, 2012 -- beet and coleus

Went to the Charlottesville Farmer's Market yesterday and came home with lots of fun things, including some beautiful beets and a flat of mixed-color coleus plants. The latter were leggy, so I pinched their top growth out. Those tips were too pretty to throw away (I actually still have them all in water, where they may root), but here are a few of them, which I put in a little green jug. To the left is one of the beets I bought. Kept trying to figure out a way to put it in the jug with the coleus, because their colors are really pretty together, but nothing I tried made the beet look as pretty as it was. So here it is positioned upside down on its trimmed stems.

June 2, 2012 -- Japanese maple revisited

Here's that same Japanese maple snippet reoriented and edited. Now you can better see how it mirrors the pattern in the vase.

June 1, 2012 -- snap redo and Japanese maple

I decided to try my Butterfly snapdragons in a different container (as opposed to the orange bag from yesterday). Here they are in a more traditional  glass vase. Prettier, I think. And all their wacky stem directions are sort of interesting.

Even more interesting to me was something that evolved yesterday afternoon. After I pulled the snaps out of their orange bag, they sat for a while in the container I'd used to line the bag--an off-white ceramic vase with sort of abstract splash of brown on it. It has a broken handle, which is why it was on the " vase liner" shelf.  Anyway, it's pattern must have been playing in my head, because later in the day, when John pruned a piece of foliage out of a Japanese maple by accident (it came down with a mulberry limb), I grabbed it because I thought it might look great in that vase.  This greenery needs some editing (more open spaces), but you can see that the shape of the Japanese maple leaves really does echo the pattern on the vase.  It's just so much fun the way these things evolve!